His Company, and the Case Against Divorce

The exchange recorded between the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and Shayṭān, set out in the part before this — reported through two chains, one from Anas ibn Mālik and the other from Muʿādh ibn Jabal in Ibn ʿArabī's Shajarat al-Kawn, and also found in al-Ghazālī's Talbīs Iblīs — continues here. Asked whom he most liked to keep company with, Shayṭān had already answered that his best friend was the one who dealt in usury; that among all his friends the adulterer stood closest; that his bedfellow was the drunkard, whom he took to hug and sleep beside; that his guests were thieves; and that his representatives, his salesmen as it were, were the magicians, the soothsayers and the fortune-tellers. Asked what pleased him most, he had answered: divorce.

There is a report of the Messenger of Allah describing how Shayṭān conducts his own affairs. He sits upon his throne, and each morning or evening receives a report from the lesser devils under him, each recounting the worst thing he managed that day. One reports that he made a man backbite another and spread gossip between them: no good, comes the answer. Another, that he led a man into fornication: no good. Another, that he made a man steal, or broke his ablution: no good, get away. Then one comes and says that he found a husband already in a foul mood, and worked upon him, and found the wife in a foul mood too, and worked upon her as well, until the two of them quarrelled and would not speak, and slept in separate beds, and the quarrel went on, until by morning the husband, in his anger, pronounced the words of divorce three times over and the marriage was ended. Shayṭān asks him if this is true, and when told that it is, calls him forward, sets him beside himself, and places a great crown upon his head: this, he says, is the best that has been done.

Divorce, though a permitted thing, is the most hated of all permitted things in the sight of Allah; a hadith describes even the heavens as trembling when a divorce takes place. Yet in the present age it has become the easiest thing done: in a society such as the Australian one, more than fifty-five per cent of marriages end this way, nearly one in two, and the same is true even among the newly married among Muslims. Muslims, in large part, do not know the obligations they owe one another, and over matters that are not even worth a storm in a cup, they resort to separation and divorce — let us just get divorced — which is not how the matter stands in Islam. Once married, a person is bound to the other, for good or for difficult, and must work at it, the way any partnership or venture has its early years of difficulty; five years of any business partnership brings its own teething troubles, and a person must come to know the other, must become part of the solution rather than the problem, must set selfishness aside. Marriage ends the standing of "I" and begins that of "us": each owes the other rights, ḥaqq, and must fulfil them. Where they are not fulfilled, Shayṭān finds his opening — helped along by the idea of marriage many now hold, borrowed from its depiction in film: falling in love first, some fairy tale of romance, until, when the reality of daily life arrives, the question comes — is this the same person once found so beautiful, now no more than an irritation? — and, finding faults where once there was only admiration, the marriage is written off. This is Shayṭān's greatest pleasure. In a Muslim household, where husband and wife quarrel, there is no place for domestic violence; a wife who goes back to her parents' house is told, firmly, to return and work the matter out with her husband, rather than making a habit of walking out each time there is pressure between them — not by force or by a blow, but by insistence that a marriage is not undone so lightly, and that there are avenues of counselling and other help to draw upon first. Divorce, though permitted, remains the very last resort in Islam — this is not Catholicism, where it is forbidden outright, but neither is it the readiest option.

Asked next whom he loved most of all, Shayṭān answered: those who abandon the Friday prayer. A person who misses the Friday congregation three times running has his heart sealed, and this is hypocrisy, plainly. In the version of this exchange narrated by Anas ibn Mālik, Shayṭān names eight further companions of his: the tyrants; the arrogant; scholars who serve their political masters and hide the truth to please them; dishonest tradesmen; drinkers of wine; those who deal in fraud; slanderers; and those who stir up trouble between friends.